Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

I can’t say that I ever feel what it felt like then, when I was happy. But sometimes something will touch the place where that feeling was, a touch as slight and swift as the brush of a moth’s wing in the dark.

It was a voice full of light and dark. Light not only as it glimmers, but also as it glares. Dark not only as it brings cold and fear, but also as it gives rest and shade.

The Bradfords’ son was a rake-shamed, drunken fanfarroon

“In the midst of life, we are in Death,”

at such a time, it is easier to believe in God’s vengeance than His mercy.

so is God here, near to us, nearer, perhaps than He has ever come, or ever will come, in all our lives.”

Her little face shone as she gazed at us and saw her only hope.

is a great thing to be young and to live without pain. And yet it is a blessing few of us count until we lose it.

Why, I wondered, did we, all of us, both the rector in his pulpit and simple Lottie in her croft, seek to put the Plague in unseen hands? Why should this thing be either a test of faith sent by God, or the evil working of the Devil in the world?

Like our blessed Lord, we can only implore God: ‘Take this cup away from me.’ But then, like him, beloved friends, we must add the words, Not my will, but Thine, be done.”

“I wonder if you know how you have changed. It is the one good, perhaps, to come out of this terrible year. Oh, the spark was clear in you when first you came to me—but you covered your light as if you were afraid of what would happen if anybody saw it. You were like a flame blown by the wind until it is almost extinguished. All I had to do was put the glass around you. And now, how you shine!”

For life is not nothing, even to the grieving. Surely humankind has been fashioned so, otherwise how would we go on?

We live, we live, we live, said the hoofbeats, and the drumming of my pulse answered them. I was alive, and I was young, and I would go on until I found some reason for it.